The Most Dangerous Toy – What deadly toy did you grow up with?

Everyone loves A Christmas Story and if you don’t you are wrong and we cannot be friends. Little Ralphie wants a Red Ryder BB gun so he can defend his family from Black Bart. But as we all know, his mother thinks he will shoot his eye out. And he comes damn close!

So, I decided to ask a few members of my fellow AiPT! staff what is the most dangerous toy that they had as a child.

Nathaniel: The most dangerous looking toy I had was the original HasbroMegatron. I actually was disappointed when my mom first got him for me. Cars and planes are cool, but what the hell was I gonna do with a robot that turned into a Walther P38? Don’t get me wrong; it looked awesome and while it could not shoot bullets, I could pistol whip the hell out of someone. It just didn’t fit into my fantasy world.

Of course, I could also get personal and deep about my most dangerous toy. I have epilepsy and before I started taking medication would get grand mal seizures. Those are the type you think of when someone says “seizure.” Anyway, video games can trigger seizures so I guess you could say the NES was my most dangerous toy. Personally, I think the fun factor outweighed the danger.

One’s health takes a back seat when you are searching for that Warp Whistle!

But the most dangerous toy I ever had were some little clown figures I got from Juarez. They were cool and poseable and seemed to be made out of rubber. The problem was they were harder than any kid’s toy should be. If you played with them for any amount of time, they also left a black residue on your hands that would make your hands itch. I still have them somewhere. Maybe I should give them to my godson.

Kendra: I had several of the worst 90’s toys. I jammed Skydancers into my eyes, tripped over my Skip-It, rolled my ankles repeatedly on my sisters Pogo Ball, shaved my shins off on trampoline springs, and burned myself with Easy Bake Ovens. I was a terribly clumsy child.

Moon Shoes: The cause of broken asses all over the United States!

My favorite were those Nickelodeon Moon Shoes. They were so much…until I fell down a set of stairs and broke my tailbone. I think I was maybe seven at the time? My mother thought I was just being dramatic, but I remember legitimately crawling across the floor screaming and crying in pain. I guess the joke’s on her- I still suffer from intense lower back pain 20-something years later. Haha, Mom. HA.

Brian: I honestly can’t remember or find the brand, but one of my good friends and I played with a deluxe chemistry set in the late 1980s that was stupidly dangerous. Now, it had nothing on vintage sets of yore that contained poisonous chemicals or actual uranium, but a pair of pre-teens with 20 or so chemicals and no experience or supervision managed to set plastic on fire. Not melt, on fire. It burned and ashed away into our lungs.

There are probably a lot of us out there that shouldn’t have had these in our possession.

I know it seems cliche, but growing up in the 80s was having a toy box full of “what could go wrongs.” Between the Pogo Ball, Slap Bracelets, trampolines with no nets or padding, Easy-Bake Ovens with deceptively hot light bulbs, and the most dangerous game of all, lawn darts, it’s a wonder so many of us survived intact.

David H: I feel like I can echo Kendra and Brian. I also had a Pogo Ball that I easily sent 15 feet away from me as I lost my balance and hit the ground. I too had a chemistry set that is pretty safe to say that I shouldn’t have had in my possession.

But the one toy that probably almost killed me was my bicycle. No, I didn’t do any crazy tricks or tried to jump ramps. My grandparents got me a bike that was way to big for me; something I could “grow” into. My parents let me ride to see if I was able to. I could ride it just fine, but it was an older bike, so in order to use the brake, you would move the pedals backward to stop. I couldn’t get my balance straight to get my feet to go backwards, so what I did was ride the bike to a chain link fence in my front yard and jump off the bike. I would be secure on the fence as the bike would keep rolling until it fell over.

Yes, the seat was this high.

What’s so dangerous about that? I was going pretty fast for a seven year old at times and would not always grab that fence securely. I got bruised and scratched up on that chain link fence. The funny thing is we moved when I was young and I still go by that old house every now and then and that same fence still stands!

What is the most dangerous that you had as a child? Did you almost put your eye out like Ralphie? Burn your house down with a chemistry experiment? Impale your brother with a lawn dart? Tell us about it in the comments!